America Was Hard to Find

by Kathleen Alcott

  “You know, don’t you, how many are dead at this point? Should I remind you?”

  The spoon was still now where it lay across his limp hand; there was cereal in his mouth he couldn’t bother to chew. He still smelled of and felt like the sex he’d had, a second time in the morning, his hair staticky and his skin flushed, and he believed this was something Braden could see, a crime as visible as an ill-conceived tattoo.

  “Tell me,” he said, the words coming from a numb mouth and sounding, he knew, teenage and insolent.

  “Sixteen thousand one hundred two, two thousand sixty one in this country alone. But like, how were the baths, babe?”

  “I wasn’t at the baths. I don’t need to go to the baths to find—”

  “Oh yeah? What’s his name? How about the one yesterday?”

  “Peggy Sue, both of them.”

  The moment he could have apologized was gone, the light opening with the fog burning off, and then Braden turned to leave.

  “Who your mother was doesn’t give you a pass,” he said, speaking in the direction of the hallway from the kitchen. “You don’t get credit for what your parents thought. Some people are meeting downtown tonight to march on city hall. I’m walking over after my lunch shift. Eight.”

  “Okay,” he said, the word sounding like an apology and a defense both. “I’ll be there.”

  HE LOOKED OUT AT THE rest of the day from inside a haze, walking without a destination in mind, stopping at one point in a kitchen supply store for reasons unclear, skulking even there, darting out when a salesman asked him if there was something he’d like to see. Back at home he finally showered, something he always put off after sex. He liked smelling foreign, liked the idea that his body had become partially the province of someone else. Sex with men was the only place in his life free of interpretation, his mind relieved of its obsession to comment and criticize. Now it too was politicized, a comment on who he was and who he failed to be.

  Naked in his room after, pushing his shoulder sockets far across his chest, rocking back on his tailbone to see the skin between his legs, he looked for the change that half of him believed he deserved, a small purple spot that would signal the proliferation of all other symptoms. It would be the beginning of a new season in his life, the last. Paper gowns, lines at the pharmacy. It wasn’t there. He got into bed, his face in a rectangle of sun that was two degrees warmer, and told himself he would close his eyes for a brief, quiet moment, just until his skin was dry, just until he felt warm enough. He woke at 6:50 and at 7:10 and at 8:05, each time to the sound of a kneeling bus exhaling, each time telling himself that there was enough time, small and gentle lies that were obliterated when he finally woke. He waited for Braden to come home, the apology lachrymose in his mouth, an insistence on next time, a reference to a fatigue he couldn’t shake. A certain way he would touch him, a hug from behind with one hand slipped up to cradle his friend’s face. They had their cycles, he told himself, movements in which it was up to one of them to make declarations, to cook dinner unprompted or knock another time on the locked bedroom door. It was only a matter of focused generosity, and then they’d be back in their deep circuitry, a system of rapid-fire references no one else could parse, foreheads glued on a couch in the corner of some party, the annoyance and envy of anyone who tried to enter the conversation.

  Wright spent three days waiting, leaving notes even when he stepped out for the smallest of errands, I’ve missed you and I hope you’ll let me make it up to you, What do you say to a bike ride to Baker Beach this weekend, but they remained untouched where he’d left them, propped up by a vase of peonies or balanced on Braden’s doorknob. He was sleeping somewhere else. When he did come home, it was difficult at first to name the difference, because much of how Braden behaved was the same, substituting lyrics of pop songs to denigrate their landlord, answering Wright’s questions where he stood tweezing in the bathroom mirror with the poise and wit of a winning game show contestant.

  It was not incremental—Wright didn’t understand it, and then he did. It was his eyes: Braden wouldn’t look at him.

  On an evening hemmed in by rain, Braden was at the kitchen counter, dicing small dark mushrooms, a cookbook propped open by a wooden spoon along its length, the Supremes on the turntable. Wright sat smoking on a stool near the open back door that led to an exposed stairwell, a drafty clapboard pathway from which a neighbor’s head might occasionally pop in. He could feel the weather that way, the small changes in intensity, and he knew it bothered Braden, the Midwesterner in him that believed a house should be what kept you from the disorder of the world.

  “What’s for dinner? Need me to do anything?”

  “Chicken marsala. I need you to keep breathing.”

  It was his standard response, worn and familiar. They settled into a comfortable conversation, talk of Judy, calling her Mother, calling her Little Miss Middle Age. “How was she today,” Wright had said.

  “Besides the picture of health and beauty?”

  “Yes, a given.”

  “Well, during a tasting before the rush she blew her ass like a trombone—”

  “Like seventy-six of them—”

  “Yes,” Braden said, “she was absolutely leading the big parade. But so she blew her ass as she was pouring us this chenin blanc, it sounded like a two-hundred-year-old wedding dress being ripped in half by the angry hand of god, and then pretended to be frightened. ‘Something fell, something big.’ She made Shelly run down to the cellar and check.”

  The story brought a happy tear to Braden’s eye and then, as he went to wipe it, he gasped like a moviegoer and started to swear. Wright rushed to his bent shape, spreading a hand on each shoulder, saying let me see, let me see you. The mushrooms in the saucepan continued to simmer, popping and hissing, and Diana Ross still came upset and proud from the speaker. Braden was screaming and whimpering and would not turn his face.

  “It’s the chili from the salad,” he said, finally. “Right in my eye. Don’t touch me, don’t touch me, don’t touch me.” The insistence on this seemed outsized, as though it were his whole body exposed and injured.

  “You need cream,” Wright said. “An acid as an antidote.” It was a piece of information coming to him from he didn’t know where, a part of him that sounded like his mother, and then he was pulling some yogurt from the fridge and spreading it on a clean napkin he had worked into a kind of blindfold.

  “I can’t believe how badly it hurts,” Braden said, in the dark of his bedroom, on top of the perfectly made bed where Wright spread the poultice over his face. “I know,” Wright answered, believing Braden was speaking to him, but when he returned to the kitchen to finish dinner, he could hear him still repeating this to himself, murmuring like a kid who believes his thoughts don’t exist unless they are spoken aloud. By the time the food was ready and Wright stood at the door frame with a plate, Braden was asleep, exhausted by the shock.

  “How’s the eye,” he said, the next day, catching Braden in the hall when he came in drunk and late, taking his chin with two fingers to try to tilt it up. The looseness of his entry, the freedom of his body, was gone immediately. He locked his jaw and swiveled around toward his room, but Wright caught his shoulder, more violently than he wanted to, his advantage of height and weight suddenly clear. Little Bullet, people called Braden behind his back, or Naps, short for Napoléon.

  “Look at me.”

  “No.”

  “Look at me.”

  Wright had his legs in a V now, either foot parallel to the baseboards, blocking Braden from the path to his room. A bottomless minute opened around them.

  “Fine.”

  And then Braden did. Wright regretted the command immediately, for he understood that in refusing to look at him, Braden had, in some way, been protecting him. There was nothing in his look of who they were to each other, no depth or light to the glance. His face, regarding Wright’s, was of someone in a busy crosswalk, staring ahead only for the sake of safety.
In the twenty seconds that he stood there taking this in, Wright replayed every remark Braden had made that referenced this part of him. Talking about an ex whose name he had firmly vowed never to say again, about his bigoted mother whose birthday cards he marked, every year, Return to Sender. He had seemed so brave to Wright in these conversations, so in command of his life and what love or cruelty he allowed into it. It had never occurred to Wright he might pass to the other side of Braden’s life.

  “What is this? Why are you acting like I’m anybody else?”

  “It’s not even a feeling I want to have,” Braden said, back to looking down now, picking something out from under his thumbnail, pushing his hair behind his ear. “I didn’t even realize I was doing it, not looking at you, until the little habañero incident. Do you want me to apologize for something as crude as instinct?”

  “I’m going to bed.”

  “Sleep well, sugar,” Braden said, in the plastic chirp he used when taking complicated orders from entitled customers at the restaurant. Wright spent the whole night awake, one knee cocked way up by his hip and then the other, adjusting to the news that the life that had come so rapidly to him had run just as swiftly away. We are, Braden had said to the group of boys gathered in the living room, some months before, the wooden spatula in his hand a baton, in a very real sense of the word, at risk for extinction.

  11.

  He spent as much time as possible, in the weeks to come, away from the apartment, filling his leather shoulder bag with what would keep him away, books and bananas and dense ziplocked joints he wrapped in paper towels and placed in the inner compartment. He smoked on roof gardens downtown, places flanked by withering topiary and empty save the occasional forlorn banker, or in the bathroom at work, sitting on the closed toilet with both feet flat on the wall. He got high on the backs of buses as they strained uphill and watched whatever was left behind on the seats roll with the snaking curves, stray chips, forgotten ChapSticks, ambitious threads of urine. He woke in ten different bedrooms, twenty, places whose windows only faced another building, some with ladders to the roof, and took photos of each, though never the people they belonged to. Fishbowls, waterbeds, overflowing closets. The men attached to these rooms hardly mattered, although he kissed them goodbye, their necks pale as milk or sandy with freckles, although he thanked them, the men he had slapped and pushed and choked. He asked to be spanked, for a fist inside of him, for a belt around his neck. He tried every fantasy, every exit. When he did have to come home, when he miscalculated, watched his target float out the door with somebody else, he made sure to piss and brush his teeth at whichever bar, minimizing the possibility of a bathroom run-in. He left nothing of his in the common area besides a check for the rent. He could not imagine how long this might go on, but he also could not imagine very long at all. The time in front of him was flat then sheer, something he would fall from soon.

  That the rest of their friends felt the same about him he believed because he had not heard otherwise. Held up during the marches that had become as ubiquitous as any other type of traffic, there was a popular sign, in pink glitter, in gold, in plain black capitals, spelled out one letter at a time on T-shirts worn by a line of people: SILENCE = DEATH. The change in the city was so total that the color and pageantry of it before seemed like a false memory. It was in the way that people behaved in restaurants and movie theaters, older women opening doorknobs with handkerchiefs, families moving rows because of their proximity to a cough. Where there had been gaggles of boys on the sidewalks, knit together by conversation and moving like pool balls inside a wooden triangle, there were now single men. They had canes and plastic bags from the pharmacy, they wore sweaters and sunglasses and sheath-y coats, anything to make the membrane between life and body thicker. Conversations were quieter now, birthdays celebrated like unlikely successes. Wasn’t it enough, he asked, in his mind, to the sound and vision of Braden that never abated—a figure so real that he could almost get away without missing its corporeal counterpart—wasn’t it enough that he felt sorrow about it? That he had ordered so many meals he couldn’t finish. That he saw these men tapping down the street and wept.

  No, Braden said in Wright’s mind. That will never be enough. The adjudicating hand in the air, the soft palm turning over.

  AND THEN THERE WAS A day when three hundred people called to him. They were black and green-eyed and slack-jawed and thin, blond and hoarse from shouting, linked to the people they loved at the elbow. He was sitting at a sidewalk café with a novel and his camera and a dwindling pack of cigarettes when the march came through, heard long before it was seen, the diversity of voices flattened into one protracted roar. As it got closer his shame became acidic. The whole mechanism was a spectacle to him, the way a chant would begin at the front of the crowd and move back and be replaced, in a lightning minute, with the next set of words. “Won’t you join us!” they were yelling, the intonation spiking at won’t and join, four claps in between to mirror the sound and insistence, and it was such a direct plea, so literal, nothing else required but standing up, that he did.

  He was amazed by how easy it was, to see a moment and step inside it. Once he was within the river of them it was hard to believe he had been without. A man on his right gave him a squeeze as he stepped in and forgot about him just as quickly. When Wright tried to find him minutes later, the gap-toothed smile, he was gone. The individual was interchangeable here, a body moving the same way and a voice saying the same thing, strange, he thought, given that what they were yelling about was the right of the individual to continue his small, specific life. Boys on fire escapes blew kisses and then descended to become part of it. Ancient Italian men, their ceramic espresso cups aloft, their enormous watches drooping on their disappearing wrists, stared as though all five hundred of them were one defective or unauthorized thing, a car spewing violet smoke, a zoo animal loping down a sidewalk. They were moving north, taking hills without slowing. There was light on the water, boats coming in, and in the windows of houses families passing plates across tables.

  He’d been among them fifteen minutes when he realized that the moment he was waiting for, when he would open his mouth and become one of the voices, was not coming. In knowing it he stepped out, as easily as that, over a curb and onto a one-way side street, and he took the lens cap from his camera.

  THAT AFTERNOON, FOR THE FIRST time in weeks, he faced his home in the daylight. He took his shoes off at the door and stepped hesitantly through the rooms like a museumgoer, waiting for the beauty or the lesson to occur to him. Three lone sequins winked on the coffee table, pale green flotsam from some made-up occasion. On a windowsill sat a nickel and a bookmark and an open matchbook with a phone number written in it. The photos of who they had been to each other still appeared under magnets on the refrigerator, hidden partially by new layers of life, receipts and to-do lists and a Polaroid of Jean and Braden sitting on the shoulders of men Wright didn’t recognize, holding up cardboard signs in capital letters. Left out on the counter was a watermelon, and he held it up and thumped it, something his mother had taught him, a revelation at the time—that you could listen to the insides of something. He opened cupboards and washed some silverware left in the sink and felt a loose knob on a drawer. He was fixing this, a tight twirl of finger and thumb, when Braden walked in.

  “Thanks for doing that.” His speech was still xeroxed somehow, the execution like that of a distracted actor.

  “My pleasure.”

  He meant it. It was. Their life together, this apartment, had been the first occasion for Wright to stay with a problem, to understand and address it—a leak in the shower wall he caulked himself, a moth infestation they treated with sage and profanity. If you paid attention to the small, deepening dramas of the domestic, gave yourself to their remedy, you began to see yourself too as worthy of small attentions, as amenable to solutions.

  He had learned to master problems around the house, perhaps knowing how ill equipped he was in others, t
hose having to do with love, how it met respect. You need every person to love you, regardless of how you feel about them. It’s the same old show.

  “Anything else that needs fixing?”

  Braden was quiet, playing it carefully. He was weighing how much he needed help against the gratitude receiving it would entail.

  “Well—”

  “Just tell me what it is, bud.”

  Bud, kiddo, champ: this avuncular way of talking had been new to both of them, something they stepped into together from a lifetime of looking out only for themselves. It had been a performance at first, then a familiar joke, then a tender necessity. If your private life had begun too early, you needed, in this life, someone who spoke to you like a child.